The First Book

 

“You ought to write a book,” is something I’ve heard most of my adult life. 

It seems like at every get-together when someone hears one of the stories I’ve told for years, that suggestion eventually pops up. 

And it’s something I’ve considered, as I began writing slices of my life which I posted on line, in newspapers and magazines. 

And now, a few years later, I hit “print” and our printer came to life.  Within seconds it whirred,  churned, and flashed, then began slurping up blank sheets the way a kid eats spaghetti. Soon, printed pages began stacking in the tray. In 20 minutes, I had a complete manuscript of my first book - nearly 200 pages long.  I took it off the machine and tapped it repeatedly on the kitchen table to square the stack. It felt heavy, substantial - after all, it was almost half a ream of 8 1/2” x 11” paper. Each sheet, every single one, was full of…me - musings that came out of my brain, traveled into my fingers, and on to these pages. Over 46,000 words.   

I took a moment and allowed myself time to feel proud.  After all, not everyone gets to hold their thoughts in their hands. 

And then I turned to the first page and found a misspelled word and a paragraph that wasn’t indented. 

Damn.

I’m not through yet.

I should have known better. Writing is the one profession where the finish line keeps moving. You think you’ve crossed it, but it quietly moves another ten yards down the road while you’re celebrating.

Still, I sat there for a minute and thumbed through the stack. 

For years people have said, “You ought to write a book.” Usually this suggestion comes right after I’ve told some story from my childhood or something ridiculous that happened to me on the road doing comedy. People say it like writing a book is the natural next step, the way you might offer coffee to someone after they’ve finished  dinner.

“Man, that’s funny,” they’ll say. “You ought to write a book.”

The thing is, most of those people never see the other side of it.

They don’t see the mornings when you sit down at the keyboard and nothing happens except the blinking cursor staring back like it’s personally disappointed in you. They don’t see you rewriting the same paragraph six times because a sentence doesn’t quite land right. And they definitely don’t see the moment when you finally think you’ve finished…only to discover you spelled something wrong on page one.

But holding that stack of paper, I’ll admit, felt different.

I flipped through it slowly. Some pages made me smile because I remembered exactly where I was when I wrote them. A few made me laugh out loud, which I take as a good sign. If the writer laughs, there’s at least a chance the reader might too.

Other pages made me wince.

“Boy, that sentence needs work,” I muttered to nobody in particular.

Writers do a lot of talking to themselves. It’s one of the early warning signs.

I walked into the living room holding the stack like it was a newborn baby and showed it to my wife.

“Take a look at this,” I said.

She glanced at it and smiled politely the way spouses do when they’re not entirely sure how big a deal something is supposed to be.

“That’s nice,” she said.

Nice. Two hundred pages of blood, sweat, and rewrites. Conjuring up old memories from the recesses of my mind…and the official review from inside my own house is “nice.”

Still, she’s seen the process. She’s watched me sit at the computer for hours correcting a sentence that refuses to behave. She’s heard me read paragraphs out loud to her when she’s not really listening. So maybe “nice” was actually high praise.

I went back to the kitchen table and looked again at that misspelled word.

Then I picked up a pen and circled it.

Because the truth is, writing a book isn’t really about finishing.

It’s about getting close enough to finished that you finally take a deep breath, hit print, and then start fixing what you missed the first time.

And apparently, the second time. And probably the third.

Somewhere along the way, the stories you’ve been carrying around for years finally make it onto paper. Childhood memories. Old friends. Heartbreak. Lessons learned the hard way. Moments that seemed ordinary at the time but somehow stuck around long enough to become worth writing about.

And eventually, if you’re lucky, those pages pile up. About two hundred of them in my case.

Of course, before anyone else ever sees this manuscript, I’ll need to fix that misspelled word, indent that paragraph, and probably correct about a thousand other things I haven’t noticed yet.

But for one brief moment, standing there in the kitchen holding that stack of paper, I allowed myself a simple thought.

Maybe those people were right.

Maybe I finally did write a book.